A Market of Driftwood
This afternoon, I visited Fusir Ghat. As I approached the ghat, the first thing that caught my attention was the enormous quantity of wood piled up in one place. I had seen driftwood along the banks of the Teesta before, but I had never seen such a large quantity gathered together at one place. From a distance, it was clear that this was not simply a place where wood was being stored. A small system of buying and selling had developed around it.
As I went closer, I found that people who collect driftwood and submerged wood from different parts of the Teesta were bringing the wood to Fusir Ghat by boat. There was also a trader at the ghat who was buying the wood. I spoke to him and learned that he had brought a weighing machine with him. The quantity of wood brought by each person was being weighed and recorded in a notebook. The price was then determined according to the weight.
For ordinary wood, he was buying at around ₹250 per quintal. The wood is later sold to tea factories, puffed-rice factories, snack-making units and brick kilns. In many cases, the factory owners or their representatives come to the ghat with their own vehicles and collect the wood. In that arrangement, the trader does not have to bear the cost of transportation.
However, if the trader hires a vehicle himself and delivers the wood directly to a factory, he can receive around ₹500 per quintal. There is, however, another difficulty. According to him, transporting this type of wood by truck along the highway can lead to police intervention. As a result, additional expenses may sometimes have to be incurred.
The atmosphere at Fusir Ghat was a new experience for me. Although there were not a very large number of people, there was a sense of activity similar to a small marketplace. Some people were unloading wood from boats, some were examining the wood, some were negotiating prices, while others were recording the transactions. The weighing machine, the notebook and the large piles of wood together created the impression of a temporary driftwood market on the bank of the Tista. It reminded me, in a way, of the activity of a fish market, although on a much smaller scale.
The price of the wood is not the same in every case. Better-quality wood can fetch a much higher price if it is cut into pieces and arranged neatly in roughly uniform sizes. Such wood may be sold for as much as ₹500 per quintal. The people who collect and process the wood negotiate with the trader according to its quality and size. Once a price is agreed upon, the trader purchases the wood at that rate.
Later, a truck arrived at the ghat, and the large quantity of wood piled there began to be loaded onto it. Watching this process, I realised that the driftwood of the Teesta is not merely a natural material carried downstream by the river. An informal economic system has developed around it. Collecting wood from the river, transporting it by boat to the ghat, weighing it, negotiating its price, storing it and finally transporting it by truck to different factories-all these stages involve the labour and income of several people.
Behind this system, I could also see the changing livelihood conditions of the people living along the Tista. Fish are no longer as abundant in the river as they once were. The extraction of sand and stone from the river has also stopped. As a result, some of the traditional sources of income associated with the river have become increasingly limited. Some people are now collecting driftwood from the Teesta, while others are becoming involved in the trade surrounding it. Many others, meanwhile, have become migrant workers in search of livelihood elsewhere.
I have seen people collecting driftwood from the Teesta at different places before. But this was the first time I witnessed such an organised process of buying and selling—complete with weighing, record-keeping, price negotiation and transportation—at Fusir Ghat.
Today’s experience reminded me once again that a river carries more than water. Along with its water, it carries people’s livelihoods, labour, markets and local economies. As some older livelihood opportunities associated with the Teesta decline, people are finding new ways of making a living from the river itself. The trade in driftwood is a small but significant reflection of this changing relationship between the river and the people who live beside it.
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